Russell Roberts's Blog, page 64

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(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 214 of the 2021 updated version of Bjorn Lomborg’s 2020 book, False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet:

Panic  doesn’t just lead us toward bad or ineffective policy solutions – it can also lead us to focus on the wrong problems.

Judith Curry Counsels Calm About the Climate

(Don Boudreaux)

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I thank Steve Hardy for alerting me to this video featuring climatologist Judith Curry.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 214 of F.A. Hayek’s November 1941 Nature paper, “Planning, Science and Freedom,” as this paper is reprinted as chapter ten of the 1997 collection, splendidly edited by Bruce Caldwell, Socialism and War:

[T]he competitive price system makes possible the utilization of an amount of concrete knowledge which could never be achieved or approached without it. It is true, of course, that the director of any centrally planned system is likely to know more [about the economy at large] than any single entrepreneur under competition. But the former could not possibly use in his single plan all the combined knowledge of all the individual entrepreneurs that is used under competition. The knowledge which is significant here is not so much knowledge of general laws, but knowledge of particular facts and the ever-changing circumstances of the moment – a knowledge which only the man on the spot can possess. The problem of the maximum utilization of knowledge can therefore be solved only by some system which decentralizes the decisions.

DBx: Yes.

I’m aware that I repeat myself – repeatedly. But I don’t apologize for doing so, for I’ll repeat the following question until advocates of industrial policy – which is socialism-lite – offer a substantive answer to this question: How will the officials charged with carrying out industrial policy solve or escape the problem, described here by Hayek, of the utilization of decentralized and ever-changing bits of detailed knowledge?

Solving or escaping this problem is necessary if industrial policy is to enrich anyone other than the relatively few officials who run it, and the producers who are protected by it. The commonplace move of assuming that a miracle occurs doesn’t work. Ignoring the problem – another commonplace move – also is inadequate.

So how? How exactly will industrial policy make successful use of at least as much knowledge as is every moment made use of by markets?

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(Don Boudreaux)

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Charles Calomiris reviews, in the Wall Street Journal, Phil Gramm’s, Bob Ekelund’s, and John Early’s new book, The Myth of American Inequality: How Government Biases Policy Debate. A slice:

The authors—a former chairman of the Senate banking committee, a professor of economics at Auburn University and a former economist at the Bureau for Labor Statistics—show that these beliefs are false. Average living standards have improved dramatically. Real income of the bottom quintile, the authors write, grew more than 681% from 1967 to 2017. The percentage of people living in poverty fell from 32% in 1947 to 15% in 1967 to only 1.1% in 2017. Opportunities created by economic growth, and government-sponsored social programs funded by that growth, produced broadly shared prosperity: 94% of households in 2017 would have been at least as well off as the top quintile in 1967. Bottom-quintile households enjoy the same living standards as middle-quintile households, and on a per capita basis the bottom quintile has a 3% higher income. Top-quintile households receive income equal to roughly four times the bottom (and only 2.2 times the lowest on a per capita basis), not the 16.7 proportion popularly reported.

What explains the disconnect between reality and belief? Government statistical reports exclude “noncash” sources of income, which excludes most transfers from social programs. Taxes (paid disproportionately by high earners) are also ignored in official calculations. Furthermore, even the government’s “cash” income numbers are reported in a way that understates improvements in real (inflation-adjusted) income over time because government inflation measures fail to use the appropriate chained price indexes or take account of new products and services.

Increased earned-income inequality is the natural consequence of redistributive policies: if one can enjoy median household consumption without earning any income, the incentive to work is substantially diminished. This largely explains the growing distance between earned and total income for poor households (transfers to those households have gone up dramatically). Ironically, it is the very success of redistribution in reducing poverty and inequality that has led mismeasurement to create the false perception of increasing inequality.

Also recommending the Gramm, Ekelund, & Early book is David Lewis Schaefer. Two slices:

In their chapter on the “Super-Rich” (the top 0.1 percent of earners), the authors note that even this group derive a substantial part of their income from work, rather than coupon-clipping; that “almost two-thirds” had come from poor to upper-middle-class families; and that “wealthy investors who accumulate wealth but do not consume it (like the fictional Ebenezer Scrooge, or the real Warren Buffett) are public benefactors, not robbers, since “their wealth is creating jobs” and thereby “promoting the general prosperity.”

…..

Owing to its reliance on statistics rather than sweeping political claims or literary allusions, one cannot expect this book to enjoy the readership and influence of Piketty’s Capital in the Twentieth Century (it doesn’t draw “evidence” from Balzac’s novels, predict the imminent downfall of capitalism, or demand a worldwide taxing authority). Nonetheless, it would be a boon for America if reading it were required of every high school and college teacher of history and the social sciences as part of job certification.

David Henderson and Charlie Hooper rightly criticize Stanford University’s recent “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative.” Here’s their conclusion:

People have rightly derided Stanford for the EOHLI document. In doing so, we should criticize the document for the right reasons: those who constructed the EOHLI have ignored or violated the principles for clear thinking that Stanford has developed and championed over the years. Ironically, it should be Stanford itself that helps less-enlightened organizations master the techniques of clear thinking that were at least partly developed at that great university.

Richard McKenzie reveals “the ‘unseen effects’ of California’s new minimum-wage law.”

Randy Holcombe observes that the U.S. government steals from its creditors – that is, inflates away part of its debt obligations.

Scott Lincicome and Ilana Blumsack recommend deregulation to empower workers.

Fraser Myers is correct: “We are paying a heavy price for our elites’ green fantasies.”

David Zweig reports on “how Twitter rigged the covid debate.” Two slices:

I had always thought a primary job of the press was to be skeptical of power—especially the power of the government. But during the Covid-19 pandemic, I and so many others found that the legacy media had shown itself to largely operate as a messaging platform for our public health institutions. Those institutions operated in near total lockstep, in part by purging internal dissidents and discrediting outside experts.

…..

In my review of internal files, I found numerous instances of tweets about vaccines and pandemic policies labeled as “misleading” or taken down entirely, sometimes triggering account suspensions, simply because they veered from CDC guidance or differed from establishment views.

Jay Bhattacharya talks with Wesley Smith.

Jonathan Sumption on Risks, Risk Aversion, and the (Further) Rise of the Authoritarian State

(Don Boudreaux)

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The past October, Jonathan Sumption delivered a remarkable address to the Robert Menzies Institute in Melbourne. (For alerting me to Sumption’s address, I thank my Mercatus Center colleague Mikayla Novak.) Below are six slices, but do read the whole thing.

Yet in 2020, Britain, in common with Australia and almost all Western countries, ordered an indiscriminate lockdown of the whole population, healthy or sick, old or young, something which had never been done before in response to any disease anywhere. These measures enjoyed substantial public support. In Melbourne, lockdown was enforced with a brutality unequalled in liberal countries, but a Lowy Institute poll conducted in 2021 found that 84 per cent of Australians thought that their governments had handled it very well or fairly well. Australians thought even better of New Zealand’s approach, with 91 per cent in favour.

It is clear that in the intervening century between the Spanish flu and Covid, something radically changed in our collective outlook. Two things in particular have changed. One is that we now expect more of the state, and are less inclined to accept that there are limits to what it can or should do. The other is that we are no longer willing to accept risks that have always been inherent in life itself.

Human beings have lived with epidemic disease from the beginning of time. Covid is a relatively serious epidemic, but historically it is well within the range of health risks which are inseparable from ordinary existence, risks which human beings have always had to live with. In Europe, bubonic plague, smallpox, cholera and tuberculosis were all worse in their time. Worldwide, the list of comparable or worse epidemics is substantially longer, even if they did not happen to strike Europe or North America. Covid is certainly within the broad range of diseases with which we must expect to live in future. The change is in ourselves, not in the nature or scale of the risks we face.

…..

In modern conditions, risk aversion, and the fear that goes with it, are a standing invitation to authoritarian government. If we hold governments responsible for everything that goes wrong, they will take away our autonomy so that nothing can go wrong. If we demand state protection from risks which are inherent in life itself, these measures will necessarily involve the suppression of some part of life itself. The quest for security at the price of coercive state intervention is a feature of democratic politics which was pointed out in the 1830s by Alexis de Toqueville in his remarkable study of American democracy, a book whose uncanny relevance to modern dilemmas still takes one by surprise even after nearly two centuries. His description of the process cannot be bettered. The protecting power of the state, he wrote:

extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered. But it is softened, bent, and guided. Men are seldom forced to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes. It stupefies a people until each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

By definition, legal regulation is designed to limit risk by limiting freedom. Governments do this to protect themselves from criticism. During the pandemic, regulations addressed the risk of infection by Covid, because governments identified that as the thing that they were most likely to be criticised for. Governments were willing to accept considerable collateral damage to mental health resulting from the lockdown, and large increases in deaths from cancer, ischaemic heart disease and dementia. Why? Because they knew that they were less likely to be criticised for those. They would not show up in television screens, with pictures of long lines of ambulances waiting outside hospitals. They would not appear in the daily casualty lists. But they are just as real.

A good deal of historical experience suggests that people who are sufficiently frightened will submit to an authoritarian regime which offers them security against some real or imagined threat. Historically, the threat has usually been war. In the two world wars of the twentieth century Britain transformed itself into a temporary despotism, with substantial public support. Wars, however, are rare. The countries of the West have not faced an existential threat from external enemies since 1940. Today, the real threat to democracy’s survival is not major disasters like war. It is comparatively minor perils which in the nature of things occur more frequently. The more routine the perils from which we demand protection, the more frequently will those demands arise. If we confer despotic powers on government to deal with perils which are an ordinary feature of human existence, we will end up doing it most or all of the time. It is because the perils against which we now demand protection from the state are so much more numerous and routine than they were, that they are likely to lead to a more fundamental and durable change in our attitudes to the state. This is a more serious problem for the future of democracy than war.

…..

Until March 2020, it was unthinkable that liberal democracies should confine healthy people in their homes indefinitely, with limited exceptions at the discretion of government ministers. It was unthinkable that a whole population should be subject to criminal penalties for associating with other human beings, and answerable to the police for all the ordinary activities of daily life. When in early February 2020, the European Centre for Disease Control published the pandemic plans of all twenty-eight then members of the EU, including the UK, not one of these plans envisaged a general lockdown. Not one. The two principal plans were those prepared by the UK Department of Health and the Robert Koch Institute, the official epidemiological institute of Germany. They came to remarkably similar conclusions. The great object should be to enable ordinary life to continue as far as possible. The two main lessons were, first, to avoid indiscriminate measures and concentrate state interventions on the vulnerable categories; and, second, to treat people as grown-ups, go with the grain of human nature and avoid coercion. The published minutes of the committee of scientists advising the UK government show that their advice was on the same lines right up to the announcement of the first lockdown.

…..

In the UK, the man mainly responsible for persuading the government to impose a lockdown was Professor Neil Ferguson, an epidemiological modeller based at Imperial College London. His work was influential in both the UK and elsewhere. In a press interview in February 2021, Ferguson explained what changed—it was the lockdown in China. “It’s a communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought … And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.”

It is worth pausing to reflect on what this means. It means that because a lockdown of the entire population appeared to work in a country which was notoriously indifferent to individual rights and traditionally treats human beings as mere instruments of state policy, they could “get away with” doing the same thing here. Entirely absent from Professor Ferguson’s analysis was any conception of the principled reasons why it had hitherto been unthinkable for Western countries to do such a thing. It was unthinkable because it was based on a conception of the state’s relationship with its citizens which was morally repellent even if it worked.

It is not simply the assault on the concept of liberty that matters. It is the particular liberty which has been most obviously discarded, namely the liberty to associate with other human beings. Association with other human beings is not just an optional extra. It is not just a leisure option. It is fundamental to our humanity. Our emotional relationships, our mental wellbeing, our economic fortunes, our entire social existence is built on the ability of people to come together. This is why I regard lockdowns as a sustained attack on our humanity.

…..

All of this marks a radical change in the relationship between the citizen and the state. The change is summed up in the first question that was asked of the UK Prime Minister when Number 10 press conferences were opened up to the public. “Is it OK for me to hug my grand-daughter?” Something odd has happened to a society if people feel that they need to ask the Prime Minister if it is OK to hug their grand-daughter.

I would sum up the change in this way. What was previously a right inherent in a free people, has come to depend on government licence. We have come to regard the right to live normal lives as a gift of the state. It is an approach which treats all individuals as instruments of collective policy.

All of this was made possible by fear. Throughout history fear has been the principal instrument of the authoritarian state. Fear and insecurity were the basis on which Hobbes justified the absolute state. That is what we have been witnessing in the last two years. A senior figure in the UK government told me during the early stages of the pandemic that in his view the liberal state was an unsuitable set-up for a situation like this. What was needed, he said, was something more “Napoleonic”. That says it all. At least as serious as the implications for our relations with the state are the implications for our relations with each other. The use of political power as an instrument of mass coercion, fuelled by public fear, is corrosive. It is corrosive even, perhaps especially, when it enjoys majority support. For it tends to be accompanied, as it has been in Britain, by manipulative government propaganda and vociferous intolerance of the minority who disagree. Authoritarian governments fracture the societies in which they operate. The pandemic generated distrust, resentment and mutual hostility among citizens in most countries where lockdowns were imposed.

…..

Governments have immense powers, not just in the field of public health but generally. These powers have existed for many years. Their existence has been tolerable in a liberal democracy only because of a culture of restraint, a sense of proportion and a respect for our humanity, which made it unthinkable that they should be used in a despotic manner. It has only ever been culture and convention which prevented governments from adopting a totalitarian model. But culture and convention are fragile. They take years to form but can be destroyed very quickly. Once you discard them, there is no barrier left. The spell is broken. If something is unthinkable until someone in authority thinks of it, the psychological barriers which were once our only protection against despotism have vanished.

There is no inevitability about the future course of any historical trend. But the changes in our political culture seem to me to reflect a profound change in the public mood, which has been many years in the making and may be many years in the unmaking. We are entering a Hobbesian world, the enormity of which has not yet dawned on our people.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 389 of the late, great UCLA economists Armen Alchian’s and William R. Allen’s Universal Economics (2018; Jerry L. Jordan, ed.); this volume is an updated version of Alchian’s and Allen’s magnificent and pioneering earlier textbook, University Economics:

Your reputation is the public’s belief about your expected future behavior. A firm’s good reputation can be a powerful enforcer of its own reliable behavior, lest it lose future earnings. A seller’s good reputation is valuable also to potential customers because it reduces shoppers’ costs of identifying reliable sellers.

DBx: Yep.

Keep this simple but important fact in mind when you next encounter someone asserting that brand names are a capitalist plot to enrich firms at the expense of consumers.

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(Don Boudreaux)

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Coleman Hughes explains what shouldn’t, but what unfortunately does, need explaining: To ignore individuals’ skin color isn’t racist.

But color-blindness is neither racist nor backwards. Properly understood, it is the belief that we should strive to treat people without regard to race in our personal lives and in our public policy.

Though it has roots in the Enlightenment, the color-blind principle was really developed during the fight against slavery and refined during the fight against segregation. It was not until after the Civil Rights Movement achieved its greatest victories that color-blindness was abandoned by progressives, embraced by conservatives, and memory-holed by activist-scholars.

These activist-scholars have written a false history of color-blindness meant to delegitimize it. According to this story, color-blindness was not the motivating principle behind the anti-racist activism of the 19th and 20th centuries. It was, instead, an idea concocted after the Civil Rights Movement by reactionaries who needed a way to oppose progressive policies without sounding racist.

Kimberlé Crenshaw has criticized the “color-blind view of civil rights” that she alleges “developed in the neoconservative ‘think tanks’ during the seventies.” George Lipsitz, a Black Studies professor at UC Santa Barbara, writes in Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness across the Disciplines, which he co-edited with Crenshaw, that color-blindness is part of a “long-standing historical whiteness protection program” associated with “indigenous dispossession, colonial conquest, slavery, segregation, and immigrant exclusion.”

Although this public-relations campaign has been remarkably successful, it bears no relation to the truth.

The earliest mentions of color-blindness I am aware of come from Wendell Phillips, the President of the American Anti-Slavery Society and the man nicknamed “abolition’s golden trumpet.” In 1865, Phillips called for the creation of “a government color-blind,” by which he meant the total elimination of all laws that mentioned race. (Phillips was white, but it’s hard to see how his advocacy of color-blindness could have been a Trojan Horse for white supremacy, as today’s anti-racist might frame things. Black contemporaries such as George Lewis Ruffin, America’s first black judge, described Phillips as “wholly color-blind and free from race prejudice.”)

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Will Swaim rightly ridicules California’s Task Force to Study and Develop Reparations Proposals for African Americans, describing it as a “a sham, meant to divert attention from the failures of today’s state government.” A slice:

Nor does the commission explain that millions of black Americans voluntarily migrated to California. However bad it may have been, California was better for blacks than almost everywhere else. Consider the black Oklahoman who in 1923 drove to Weed, one of Northern California’s flourishing lumber towns. “Boy, I oughta been here for years back,” he told historian James Langford. “You could just almost pick your jobs when I came here. And it was a lotta, lotta black folks here.”

Arnold Kling writes realistically about government. A slice:

Unfortunately, checks and balances run afoul of the human tendency to seek authority without accountability. It is in our nature, or at least in the nature of some of us, to seek power and to evade checks on our power. Just as businessmen love competition in theory but try their best to avoid it in practice, public officials do their best to subvert whatever accountability mechanisms are in place. Humorist Mort Sahl captured the mentality of politicians when he quipped that “Richard Nixon stays up all night studying the Constitution. . .He’s looking for loopholes.” (And did he also say it about Obama?)

Officials rationalize stifling dissent as “preserving order.” They rationalize censorship as “correcting misinformation.” They rationalize expanding government authority as “protecting the public from harm” and “making their lives better.” They rationalize secretive operations as “for your own good.”

People tend to accept such rationalizations. We have legitimate fears, and we encounter social problems that appear to be crises. Political leaders promise to solve problems if they are given sufficient authority. We acquiesce, often eagerly.

Such rationalizations seem especially compelling to those in positions of power. But the end result is that officials have sawed through the cage of Constitutional limits as well as checks and balances.

Conceding power and status to public officials creates a selection problem. Political leadership emerges from a competition among people who are particularly ruthless in their striving for status and power.

David Waugh and Laura Williams decry the fact that “a dreary news cycle might mask the beauty of how markets deliver increasing prosperity for us to enjoy with our loved ones.”

My GMU Econ student Giorgio Castiglia, writing at EconLog, ponders ‘waste’ in market economies. A slice:

Given the inherent uncertainty of our world, producers will often be mistaken in their evaluation of what consumers’ wants and needs will be. The result of such mistakes is leftover product on which they must take a loss. If the firm does not incorporate such losses into future decision making, it may continue to make losses, eventually reaching an untenable financial situation.

In other words, if producers are forced to bear the costs of their own mistaken choices, such losses have a purpose in a market economy. They tell the firm that what it is producing is not of sufficient value to undergo the costs of its production. Thus, “waste” from mistaken production decisions is part of a critical feedback loop in market economies. If producers were protected from bearing the costs of such waste, we would expect more of it to occur.

Here’s Phil Magness on Fauci:

It’s clear that he gathers what he thinks the media wants to hear and then he goes on TV and repeats it back to him. And they’re like ‘oh, Fauci has spoken. This is a matter of fact now.’ But he’s only repeating their own talking points,” Magness said.

Tim Shampling tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

It’s been almost 3 years, yet I still cannot grasp how so many bright students are so willing to accept that the “pandemic” was responsible for everything, rather than feeling anger at the policy choices of their elders or even seeing them as choices that were made at all

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(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 55 of Edwin Cannan’s 1914 book, Wealth: A Brief Explanation of the Causes of Economic Wealth:

Of course no one wants money for its own sake: we want it because we can get the things and services which we want by paying it away again.

DBx: Stated so plainly, this truth is indisputable. Yet every time you encounter someone complaining about the so-called “trade deficit,” understand that you are likely encountering someone who implicitly believes that money is wanted for its own sake. A perfect example of such an economic ignoramus is Donald Trump, who in 1990 said to Playboy this: “The Japanese double-screw the U.S., a real trick: First they take all our money with their consumer goods, then they put it back in buying all of Manhattan. So either way, we lose.”

You’d have to look far and wide, and probably without success, to find as unalloyed and excellent a specimen of economic ignorance as this one remark by Trump.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from pages 36-37 of F.A. Hayek’s 1973 essay “Liberalism,” as this essay appears as chapter one of Essays on Liberalism and the Economy (2022), which is volume 18 (expertly edited by Paul Lewis), of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek:

As in the intellectual so in the material sphere, competition is the most effective discovery procedure which will lead to the finding of better ways for the pursuit of human aims. Only when a great many different ways of doing things can be tried will there exist such a variety of individual experience, knowledge and skills, that a continuous selection of the most successful will lead to steady improvement.

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My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, took a look at Stanford University’s recently proposed index of forbidden words. A slice:

Actually, exploring the list is intellectually painful. While I’m all in favor of avoiding the use of genuinely offensive terms, Stanford’s list assumes extreme fragility on behalf of pretty much everyone. I find this assumption insulting, but perhaps I’m not adequately representative of, or in touch with, public opinion.

George Will has four good suggestions for the 118th U.S. Congress. Two slices:

Speaking of which, how are you, dear reader, coping with the stress of life during 42 simultaneous emergencies? That is how many have been declared and never terminated by recent presidents. These executives triggered the expansion of their powers under some of the 136 laws by which Congress has authorized special powers for the president when he or she declares them needed to cope with an “emergency” that he or she has discerned.

An actual emergency, an event that requires an instant augmentation of the president’s power to act unilaterally, is a sudden surprise requiring quick executive nimbleness. If the event persists, it becomes just a problem, which should be dealt with by normal government processes. So, a third matter Congress should address is the emergency of “emergency abuse.” Several senators have proposed bills to do this. One from Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) stipulates that a declaration of national emergency shall last for 30 days “and shall terminate when that 30-day period expires, unless there is enacted into law a joint resolution of approval.”

…..

Congress’s core power, of the purse, entails an obligation to ensure that federal money does not fund practices inimical to constitutional principles. Defenders of those, who have uttered Voltaire’s prayer (“O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous”), had this prayer answered, yet again, last week: Stanford’s “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative” advised, among many other hilarities, against identifying Americans as “Americans,” lest there be hemispheric sadness, or something. Too often, however, academia’s itch to fine-tune speech and other behavior slides from ludicrous nitpicking into sinister enforcement of orthodoxies. Congress should say: We will fund only institutions that content themselves with being ludicrous.

Here’s David Henderson on John Bates Clark.

Steve Landsburg writes with characteristic insightfulness about Trump and tax returns.

Art Carden explains what would likely would have happened if New Coke had been a government program. A slice:

All of this has me wondering: what if New Coke, Crystal Pepsi, and failed McDonald’s menu items had been government programs? The reaction might have been swift (people took to the streets after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, for example) but it probably would have taken a lot longer for these companies to correct their mistakes, if they did at all. In the meantime, valuable land, labor, and capital would have been tied up in producing products hardly anybody wanted. They would have been difficult to get rid of because each would have had a vocal constituency trying to protect it (I have fond memories of McDonald’s chicken fajitas and would love to see them return). The government regulators would have been poorly positioned to decide because they would not have faced direct costs or enjoyed direct benefits. In a market economy, profits and losses give us pretty reliable guidance as to when we’re using resources wisely or wastefully.

Markets get things very wrong very frequently, but they make effective use of decentralized “knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place” and provide very swift, easy-to-interpret feedback in the form of profits and losses. There is no analog to a share price or an earnings report to discipline governments, and thus “temporary” agencies like the Small Business Administration live on, while unambiguous incursions against liberty and wastes of resources like the Transportation Security Administration it seems we will always have with us.

[DBx: Beyond assuming that miracles occur, proponents of industrial policy have never come close to explaining how the problem here identified by Art would be avoided by real-world industrial policy.]

“George Washington’s Legacy and the Electoral Count Reform Act.”

Here’s part 22 of George Selgin’s important series on the New Deal.

Amazing that it remains necessary for Phil Magness to point out that Salvador Allende was, in fact, a thug.

Christopher Snowdon reports on how SAGE nearly stole from Brits Christmas 2021. A slice:

The evidence that Omicron was more infectious (which it was) came from South Africa and was immediately considered settled science. But when evidence from South Africa suggested that Omicron was resulting in relatively few hospitalisations and deaths (which it also was), SAGE experts went out of their way to dismiss it. South Africans were younger, they said. They had built up immunity from earlier waves, they said, as if the UK hadn’t had its own waves of infections and a far more extensive vaccination programme.

This was perhaps the most shameful episode of the whole campaign. Almost from the outset, doctors in South Africa were telling us that Omicron was ‘far less severe’ and that the UK was ‘panicking unnecessarily’. Anyone who followed the data from South Africa could see what they were talking about. Waves of infections rose and then fizzled out with far fewer hospital admissions and deaths than in previous waves. On social media, this was dismissed as ‘hopium’ and a range of excuses were wheeled out, such as it being summer in the southern hemisphere and South Africa having a lower rate of obesity (which, in fact, it does not). The head of the South African Medical Association, Dr Angelique Coetzee, later said that she was asked by European scientists to shut up about Omicron being milder.

Vinay Prasad got covid!!!

Ryan Ciminski tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

I’m only 20 and I’m sure as hell that I’ll believe the opposite of whatever the government says for the rest of my life. There’s no chance of regaining my trust after the last two years. Not even the most basic services like public health can be trusted.